from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

from The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

n. a spirit believed to inhabit an object or preside over a place (especially in ancient Roman religion)

Etymologies

Latin nūmen, nod of the head, divine power, numen.

(American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)

Examples

For it was an attempt to supersede the ancient religious life of that State by _externa superstitio, prava religio_ -- _prava_, because _deorum numen praetenditur sceleribus_; and hence, as Livy expresses it in the admirable speech put into the mouth of the consul, the Roman gods themselves felt their _numen_ to be contaminated. [

Where events carry modalities of conviction or disposition — “must/must-not happen” or “should/should-not happen” — it may be more useful to treat this a strong/weak distinction, and take the flavour of the quirk as a product of its positive or negative loading: that which we revere may be termed a numen; that which we abhor may be termed a monstrum.

The translation has often given cause for dispute, as 'numen' is a word that may be translated as vague-sounding Providence, as a rather non-commital Deity or as the strict and fierce monotheistic God.

Where tremulum and staccatum are most applicable when it comes to character motivation, it should be noted, numen and monstrum may well be constructed entirely from the reader's disposition/conviction.

The new ruptura monstrum, the new miasma that stains Orestes, renders him subject to the vengeance of the Furies, is set against our sympathy, against the affective warp that cries out for a numen, the solution that “should happen”.

Rather than just dewarping an alethic quirk -- a giant robot, for example -- by finding an answer to the "How could this happen?" question, the reader might more commonly be responding to it as a numen, parsing it as something that should happen -- cause giant robots are cooooool!